She knew that
the two were engaged for that she had learned from Mrs Quantock in her
morning's drive, and did not attempt to conceal the fact, but how could
it be accounted for that looking impressively from the one to the
other, she said that a woman no longer young but tall, and with fair
hair had crossed their lives and had been connected with one, of them
for years past? It was impossible to describe Elizabeth more accurately
than that, and Mrs Weston in high excitement confessed that her maid
who had been with her for fifteen years entirely corresponded with what
the Princess had seen in her hand. After that it took only a moment's
further scrutiny for the Princess to discover that Elizabeth was going
to be happy too. Then she found that there was a man connected with
Elizabeth, and Colonel Boucher's hand, to which she transferred her
gaze, trembled with delightful anticipation. She seemed to see a man
there; she was not quite sure, but was there a man who perhaps had been
known to him for a long time? There was. And then by degrees the
affairs of Elizabeth and Atkinson were unerringly unravelled. It was
little wonder that the Colonel pushed Mrs Weston's bath-chair with
record speed to "Ye signe of ye daffodil," and by the greatest good
luck obtained a copy of the "Palmist's Manual."
At another of these informal seances attended by Goosie and Mrs
Antrobus, even stranger things had happened, for the Princess's hands,
as they held a little preliminary conversation, began to tremble and
twitch even more strongly than Colonel Boucher's, and Mrs Quantock
hastily supplied her with a pencil and a quantity of sheets of foolscap
paper, for this trembling and twitching implied that Reschia, an
ancient Egyptian priestess, was longing to use the Princess's hand for
automatic writing.
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